I want to focus on the doctors and the rest of us who will be harmed if [a Canadian case on euthanasia] becomes law. We don’t need to speculate. The Netherlands has already gone down this slippery slope and provided the grizzly statistics that should stop us going down the same path.

In 1990, 130,000 people died in the Netherlands: 2,300 people asked doctors to kill them; 400 asked doctors to provide them with the means to kill themselves; 8,100 died when doctors deliberately gave them an overdose of pain medication to kill them (for which 4,941 patients didn’t consent); 1,040 people died when doctors euthanized them without their knowledge or consent (72 per cent of those never having given any indication they would want their lives terminated).

That’s breathtaking in more than one way.

It’s not so much that nine per cent died at the hands of doctors, which is alarming in and of itself. What should raise our cries of outrage is that 4,941 people (four per cent) did not give their consent to being killed. A doctor who operates on someone without their consent can be successfully sued and made to pay huge dollars for having done so. The same should apply for killing a person without their consent.

And it’s the 1,040 people (one per cent) who were killed without their knowledge or consent and the 749 who never wanted to die early that should get us up in arms.

“In only 23 years, Dutch doctors have gone from being permitted to kill the terminally ill who ask for it, to killing the chronically ill who ask for it, to killing newborn babies in their cribs because they have birth defects, even though by definition they cannot ask for it. Dutch doctors also engage in involuntary euthanasia without significant legal consequence, even though such activity is officially prohibited,” writes Wesley J. Smith in Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder.

II.

So here’s where it gets confusing. The article doesn’t cite its sources, but a quick Googling finds that all its numbers come from an article by the “Patients Rights Council”, which does cite its source as the Remmelink Report, a huge report by the Dutch government in 1990.

The Remmelink Report is not on the Internet, and in any case it is in Dutch. However, an English language paper summarizing the results was published in the Lancet, and an English language digest of the report is on Google’s cache.

The numbers in the digest and the Lancet article are somewhat different from the numbers in the article, and I was somewhat uncertain who to believe – the people who seem to have a much more complete copy of the report in the original Dutch, or my own lying eyes?

Luckily, some people who ought to know have weighed in to guide me. Some of the authors of the Remmelink Report, in a biting English-language article called “Dances With Data”, complain about constant misrepresentations and lies about their research and request that “we can only hope that the truly interested reader will take the trouble of reading the Lancet article or the English version of the report itself, instead of relying on this faulty description.”

So I’m going to take this as carte blanche to trust that the Lancet article and the English language digest of the report correctly capture the report’s findings and to start criticizing these other articles based on that. So:

Both the McTavish/Patients’ Rights articles and the Lancet version of the Remmelink Report agree that there were 2300 cases of active voluntary euthanasia and 400 of physician assisted suicide.
These are the cases we would classically treat as euthanasia. The report says that they were all done consensually, and in fact this is tautological as if they had not been done consensually they would have been classified as murder rather than euthanasia. Of these cases the report (but not the article) clarifies that:

We found that in the Netherlands over 25 000 patients per year seek assurance from their doctors that they will assist them if suffering becomes unbearable. Each year there are about 9000 explicit requests for euthanasia or assisted suicide, of which less than one-third are agreed to. In most cases alternatives are found that make life bearable again, and in some instances the patient dies before any action has to be taken.

In 96% of instances of euthanasia and assisted suicide the physicians stated that the request of the patient was explicit and persistent. (The finding that there always was a request of some sort is circular since such a request is at the core of the definition of euthanasia in the Netherlands.) In 94% the request had been made repeatedly; in 99% the physicians felt sure that the request had not been made under pressure from others; and in all cases they were convinced that the patient had sufficient insight and knowledge of the course of disease

Along with these cases, both report and article agree that there were about 1000 people who were killed by physicians without “a clear and explicit request from the patient”. However, the article simply leaves it at that, whereas the report adds:

“In 59% of life terminating acts without explicit request the physician had some information about the patient’s wish [eg the patient had previously asked to be euthanized if a situation like this one arose]; in 41% discussion on the decision would no longer have been possible. The physician (specialist or general practitioner) knew the patient on average 2.4 years and 7.2 years, respectively. Life was shortened by between some hours and a week at most in 86%. In 83% the decision has been discussed with relatives and in 70% with a colleague. In nearly all cases, according to the physician, the patient was suffering unbearably, there was no chance of improvement, and palliative possibilities were exhausted.”

So baaasically, patients with only a few hours left to live who are in comas and have usually previously asked their physicians to euthanize them and whose family members have all said this is what the patient would have wanted and who have been evaluated by a bunch of doctors who say there’s no way they’re waking up – sometimes these people get mercy killed. It’s unclear to me whether this was legal in the Netherlands at the time or not, but it’s hard to call this grisly.

The articles and report then go into two more categories which are a little more worrying:

First, there are “22 500 cases where the patient had died after the administration of drugs to alleviate pain and symptoms in such dosages that the risk of shortening the patient’s life was considerable. In 6 per cent of these cases life-termination was the primary goal and in the remainder it was the secondary goal. In about 40 per cent of these cases the decision to increase drug dosages and the possibility that this might hasten death had been discussed with the patient. In 73 per cent of the cases where these matters had not been discussed with the patient, the patient was incompetent.” According to another Lancet paper, “In 85 percent of all such cases, the physician said that he or she had no intention of hastening death, but had taken into account the probability or certainty that death would occur. In 64 percent of cases the physician estimated that the patient’s life had been shortened by less than 24 hours, and in 16 percent it was shortened by less than one week”

This situation is pretty common everywhere. The patient’s clearly on her deathbed and in terrible pain. The physician says “We need to up the dose of morphine to keep her comfortable.” The intern says “We can’t up the dose of morphine! She’s already close to the maximum dose of morphine my pharmacology book says is safe for her body weight!” The physician just glares, and says “What’s the worst that could happen? She dies an hour from now instead of a day from now? That’d be a f@*king tragedy, wouldn’t it? Just give her the damn morphine.”

These numbers provide no evidence that any of the six to fifteen percent of cases in which life shortening was a significant goal overlap with the cases in which the patient was not asked for consent. Actually, they don’t even provide any evidence that the patient died because of these drug doses, just after them (and it seems pretty reasonable that death comes after being given drugs for a rationale that includes a person being on their deathbed). I’m classifying this as “worrying” only because we can’t prove from these numbers that there was no one who should have been asked for consent but wasn’t.

The second of these two categories is withholding of treatment. The report says: “There were 22 500 cases where death had resulted from non-treatment decisions (ie withdrawal or withholding of medical treatment), representing 17.5 per cent of all deaths. In 30 per cent of these cases the non-treatment decision had been discussed with the patient. In 62 per cent of these cases it had not. In 88 per cent of all cases where the non-treatment decision had not been discussed with the patient, the patient was incompetent.”

Here we can calculate that in about 7% of these cases, decision to withhold treatment was not discussed with a competent patient. However, the authors of this study have mentioned elsewhere that they include futile treatment in these numbers – ie treatment that wasn’t working or was just making the patient worse. They also mention that these treatments included feeding tubes, ventilators, et cetera – so that this “withdrawal of treatment” is just what we would call “pulling the plug” in an American hospital. Once again, I include this statistic in the “worrying” category only because we can’t prove from these numbers alone that non-futile treatment was never withdrawn without consent.

But here’s the thing: giving near-death people dangerously high drug doses and withdrawing medical treatment without patient consent are not classified as euthanasia and are both completely legal here as well. In fact, the Remmelink Report says outright that “The Dutch data on medical practices which shortens life, in the cases of non-competent or of competent but not-consulted patients, are indeed a matter of concern… [but there] really is not a shred of evidence that the frequency of this sort of behaviour is higher in the Netherlands than, for example, in the United States; the only thing that is clear is that more is known about it in the Netherlands. In short, there is no reason to assume … a causal relationship between limited legalisation of euthanasia and ‘lack of control’ over other sorts of medical behaviour.” These sorts of non-euthanasia incidents are where nearly all of the so-called “euthanized without consent” numbers are coming from – the article’s claim of 4941 Dutchmen “euthanized without consent” is actually greater than the total number of Dutch people euthanized in the study.

So here are the differences between the statistics as presented in the grizzly article & its Patients’ Rights inspiration, and the statistics as presented in the Remmelink Report:

The numbers themselves are pretty different.

The article classifies patients who asked to be euthanized if they ever had X happen to them – and then had X happen to them, and because of X were unable to explicitly consent to euthanasia at that moment – as “euthanized without consent”.

The article classifies patients whose doctors gave them unusually high doses of drugs with the aim of providing relief for pain or symptoms but without the primary goal of ending their lives as “euthanized without consent”.

The article classifies patients who were unable to consent, for example in terminal comas, but whose families said they would have wanted to be euthanized in such a situation – as “euthanized without consent”.

The article classifies patients whose lives were shortened by only a few horrible hours as “euthanized without consent”.

The article classifies several categories of actions that are not euthanasia and which are currently both legal in and widely practiced in the United States as “euthanized without consent”.

And then – surprise, surprise – it finds that a lot of people are “euthanized” “without” “consent” in the Netherlands.

III.

But we shouldn’t have to take our statistics from second-hand misinterpretations of a twenty-five year old untraceable report anyway. Back in 1990 when the Remmelink Report was written, euthanasia was in fact still illegal in the Netherlands (though decriminalized). Since then, it has been fully legalized, resulting in the ability to collect much better data. Let’s see what we can find.

One very simple statistic that doesn’t even require any digging is the life expectancy in the Netherlands. At 80.2 years, this is 15th highest in the world. It’s also higher than all the Netherlands’ neighbors, including Germany (79.8), Belgium (79.8), and its cross-Channel neighbor the United Kingdom (79.5) – not to mention of course higher than the United States (78.0). Claims from some quarters (*cough* Rick Santorum *cough*) that the Dutch elderly are living in constant fear of being murdered are hard to square with the fact that the Dutch elderly live a good deal longer than our own.

This is important because euthanasia was in fact only legalized in the Netherlands in 2002, so if we want to see what a country with legal euthanasia looks like, we need something more recent than those same few statistics the anti- crowd keeps bringing up. Further, by comparing current (legalized euthanasia) statistics to past (decriminalized euthanasia) statistics, we have a good basis for time comparison and looking at trends that might plausibly be attributed to greater legalization.

The review begins by stating the requirements for euthanasia under the Netherlands’ law:

1. The patient’s request is voluntary and well-considered;
2. The patient’s suffering is unbearable and hopeless;
3. The patient is informed about his situation and prospects;
4. There are no reasonable alternatives. Further,
5. Another independent physician should be consulted; and
6. The termination of life should be performed with due medical care and attention.

It then evaluated the 5,600 cases of legal euthanasia in the Netherlands to determine how many of them had failed one or more of those criteria. They found that “In the period 2003–2005, the review committees gave the verdict of non-compliance in 15 cases on a total of 5,600 reported cases. The main reason for the verdict of non-compliance was a failure to fulfill the requirement of consultation of a second independent physician.”

99.8% of Dutch euthanizations were performed in cases where
suffering was described as “unbearable”. This is sufficient to
disprove the contention that Dutch euthanasia is “grizzly”.

So remember how the article said that 72% of Dutch euthanasia was nonconsensual? The actual number seems more like 0.2% not following the letter of the law, and 0% involving actual consent violations.

In 1990, 1.7% of all deaths were preceded by euthanasia, as compared with 2.4% in 1995 and 2.6% in 2001 (see Table 1). This trend reversed in 2005, when 1.7% of all deaths were the result of euthanasia (approximately 2,300 cases). The number of euthanasia requests also decreased in this period: from 9700 in 2001 to 8400 in 2005.

So, we go from claims of “slippery slopes” and “as soon as it’s legal there will be pressure to apply it to more and more different groups and incidents” to “actually, incidence has been going down for the past few years.”

Table 1 further shows that the frequency of ending of life without an explicit patient request decreased from 0.8% of all deaths in 1990 to 0.4% in 2005 (approximately 550 cases annually). Further analyses of the cases of ending of life without an explicit request show that these concern nearly always patients who are very close to death, are incompetent but with whom the hastening of death has been discussed earlier in the disease trajectory and/or with their relatives, and for whom opioids were used to end life

The number of patients killed without consent was cut in half after euthanasia was legalized, and these deaths continue to be overwhelmingly done with reasonable justification.

Forgoing of potentially life prolonging treatments (either withholding or withdrawing) and intensified alleviation of symptoms occurred much more often than active ending of life. In all of the studied years, the frequency of forgoing of life-prolonging treatments was rather stable, between 16–20% of all deaths. The percentage of the use of intensified alleviation of symptoms increased from 19% of all deaths in 1990 up to 25% in 2005.

My prediction that euthanasia funges against use of potentially deadly symptom-relieving drugs seems to be disconfirmed, as that has increased over the period euthanasia has been more legal.

The prediction that euthanasia would be used as a way to get rid of the elderly was also disconfirmed. The practice was much less common among the elderly than among younger people; in 2005, 3.5 percent of deaths below age 65 were euthanasia, as opposed to 0.8% of deaths above age 80. The report attributes the discrepancy to euthanasia being a more common practice in cancer patients (who tend to be younger than most terminally ill people), plus of course the overwhelmingly higher number of other causes of death in the elderly.

Okay. Here’s the part I want to stress, because it is a study with a very good methodology on exactly the sort of question we’re worried about. Anne McTavish and the Patients’ Rights Council are concerned that there were 1040 incidents in the Netherlands of doctors ending patient lives without explicit patient request. I noted that this was not euthanasia as commonly defined and should not be expected to differ between countries with and without legalized euthanasia. So let’s see what actually happened. A study compared Netherlands (which has legalized euthanasia) with Switzerland (which has a much more limited version), and with Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and Italy (in which euthanasia was illegal at the time of this study, although Belgium has since legalized it).

They found that although the Netherlands obviously had much more euthanasia and assisted suicide than any of these other countries, it was pretty unremarkably in the middle with regard to “ending of life without explicit patient request” – Belgium was higher, Denmark was tied, and Switzerland, Sweden, and Italy were lower. However, even this doesn’t tell the whole story, since we know the Netherlands’ rate of this practice has cut in half when euthanasia was legalized after these numbers were collected in 2001. Assuming the other countries’ rates stayed stable, it should now have the third lowest rate of this practice among the six countries.

Furthermore, the Netherlands was near the bottom in “intensified alleviation of symptoms”, which I think is this study’s version of the “giving symptom-relieving drugs in quantities that might cause death”. The Netherlands had less “intensified alleviation” than Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, and Switzerland, and was beaten only by Italy. Notice that a huge amount of anti-euthanasia advocates’ claims about the evils of euthanasia in the Netherlands come from deaths from intensified alleviation, yet the Netherlands is actually one of the most conservative countries in Europe in this regard!

The report ends by concluding that:

A last important lesson that can be learnt is that the legalization of euthanasia in the Netherlands did not result in a slippery slope for medical end-of-life practices. Besides religious or principal-based arguments, the slippery slope argument is the mainstay of opponents of the legalization of euthanasia. Briefly, the argument states that: if we allow A (the use euthanasia at the request of terminally ill patients), B (abuse of euthanasia, that is, ending the life of vulnerable patient groups without their consent) will necessarily or very likely follow. B is morally not acceptable; therefore, we must not allow A (Griffiths et al. 1998; van der Burg 1992). Our studies show no evidence of a slippery slope. The frequency of ending of life without explicit patient request did not increase over the studied years. Also, there is no evidence for a higher frequency of euthanasia among the elderly, people with low educational status, the poor, the physically disabled or chronically ill, minors, people with psychiatric illnesses including depression, or racial or ethnic minorities, compared with background populations (Battin et al. 2007).

Here is my executive summary of these findings:

Anti-euthanasia advocates point out that in 1990 the Netherlands killed 1040 patients without explicit consent. However, closer examination of these cases shows somewhere between most and all to have taken place in circumstances most reasonable people would consider justified. Further, incidence of this practice declined after euthanasia was legalized. Most importantly, the Netherlands’ incidence of this practice is actually relatively low compared to other European countries, and there is no evidence that its attitudes on euthanasia are causing this to happen more often.

The numbers of “people killed without consent” are further inflated by adding people who have been given drugs like morphine for symptomatic relief. In the overwhelming majority of cases, this drugs are not intended to kill the patient and in fact do not. The Netherlands’ incidence of this practice is, once again, significantly less than the average incidence for comparable European countries and there is no evidence that its attitudes on euthanasia affect this.

Actual euthanasia never affects more than about 2.5% of deaths in the Netherlands, affects the elderly disproportionately little, and does not disproportionately affect minorities, the disabled, or any of the other groups anti-euthanasia advocates suggest it might disproportionately affect. It is practically always done in accordance with strict official guidelines, after repeated and persistent explicit patient request, with the approval of family members, and with the certification of several physicians agreeing that the patient’s disease is terminal and likely to cause intense suffering.

The statistics used by opponents of euthanasia are almost universally built on the same misinterpretation of a 25 year old report – a misinterpretation that takes its numbers out of context, which willfully misclassifies non-euthanasia causes of death as euthanasia, which ignores better and more recent data, and which has been soundly condemned as a perversion of their data by the authors of the report itself.

All responsible research on euthanasia in the Netherlands has found it to be applied responsibly, consensually, and in accordance with the legal guidelines, with no evidence of misapplication or of a slippery slope. These findings have been replicated in other countries that have more recently legalized euthanasia, such as Belgium.

This is why I felt comfortable saying in my last post that “there’s loads of good data…we can use to estimate how nonconsensual and slippery-slopey real world euthanasia is, and the answer is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

56 Responses to Fake Euthanasia Statistics

If Amanda Baggs is correct, then these numbers aren’t very useful, because doctors will refuse to consider alternatives, patients will be told there aren’t any and pressured to die, anything they say that could plausibly be interpreted as a request for euthanasia will be, and whether suffering is unbearable will be judged by the doctor rather than the patient, or the patient now rather than the patient six months later who survived on conventional treatment despite predictions to the contrary. That seems a lot harder to measure, though.

Indeed, it should never be a doctor’s decision to end a person’s life, it should always be their own decision – which then has to be respected absolutely and unconditionally, irregardless of any suffering or reason. For instance, you should have the right to freely buy the respective drugs and take them as you see fit.

Your life is yours, you don’t need a reason to end it. The very idea makes a mockery of self-ownership.

I support this basically speaking, although I anticipate quite the argument on it. My defence of it would be that the alternative would be an imposistion of our utility function on another person, fitting the general idea of “Do what we’d want in their shoes, not what they actually want”, which at basis (simply speaking) is contrary to morality.

I would point out, however, that forcing someone to pay for other people’s care while young and then forcing them to endure care against their will while old is still worse than forcing them to pay and then allowing them to access painless euthanasia services when old (on a voluntary basis).

Sometimes, at least, it should be ‘all well and good’ even if the government is. Take an individual who, hypothetically speaking, has contributed $3 billion worth of taxes over their lifetime and whose care costs $3 million.

So the numbers are useful for criticizing euthanasia and painting pictures of slippery slopes & discrimination, but they aren’t useful for supporting euthanasia? What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Sure they are. Do you have some reason to believe that either (a) this occurs in the Netherlands or (b) it would be significantly more likely to occur in the US? If the answer to both is “no”, then this is just Amanda Baggs having a scary thought or not being aware of the research.

If the answer to the first is “yes”, it should be fairly easy to find at least a few examples of local disability communities protesting, or tearful families that had their loved ones stolen away. In short, it falls on you to actually provide your evidence, rather than just allude that your opponent is wrong 🙂

I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the second question was “yes”, but… that’s the sort of cheap excuse we use to prevent National Healthcare, Electoral Reform, and the Metric System. “Oh, sure, it works everyplace else, but the US is a special snowflake.” Given all of the GOOD that could be done by not assuming the US is a special snowflake, and given the ability to *repeal* bad laws, I think we’d, again, need to see actual *evidence* before this is more than just a scary thought.

Amanda Baggs claims that horrible abuse of disabled people is routinely ignored, so the lack of Dutch protests against involuntary euthanasia doesn’t say more than the lack of American protest against – well, all the things she keeps blogging about.

I might point out, of course, that the statistics of a person’s life being ended without their consent in ways that aren’t euthanasia are worrying as well. This is not a problem restricted to just the Netherlands, of course.

If hospitalised I would want to be kept alive for as long as possible, but based on what I’ve seen on this site I fear doctors wouldn’t respect this.

The difference is that in the hospital there are no other factors involved- it’s simply a choice of Stay Alive and In Pain or Die. The way I see it, there’s a hierarchy: “Decent Life” (broadly speaking)>Non-decent life (say, in a hospital)>Death. I would always choose a higher one on the list over a lower.

I know what some people see- the categorisation was from my own perspective.

You’ve made some assumptions though. Although I put a different value on conscious v.s unconscious lifespan, I put a higher value on unconscious lifespan than I do on being dead.

I don’t have to appeal to ‘most people’ regarding the consistency of my own preferences. However, the distinction between the value of being dead v.s being unconscious explains why my preferences are consistent.

It seems odd to value unconscious lifespan. That seems to imply you would trade off some other good (e.g. conscious lifespan) for a large amount of unconscious lifespan. Maybe all conscious life for very very much unconscious life.

Funnily enough, it’s not out-and-out euthanasia that I’m so concerned about; it’s those gray areas of “ending of life without the patients’ request” where it’s not a case of actively intervening to bring about death, it’s things like “no resuscitation” and so forth.

I think there is a greater potential of misuse or error here, because it’s hard to tell when someone is on their absolute last legs, when they might live a year or so longer but in poor condition, and when they have a good chance of a substantial period of life left. I think the Netherlands is very closely monitored and they have a good system in place, but (as I’ve mentioned here before in relation to the Liverpool Care Pathway), in other countries it might not be as rigorously checked or it could be misinterpreted to be run by the administrative, not the medical, authorities in a hospital (so hitting targets for freeing up beds by putting elderly ill patients on ‘end of life’ protocols on the assumption that Mrs. F is going to die in a week or two anyway, why drag it out?)

As ever, anecdotes are not data, but from my own personal experience: my father, in his mid-70s, suffered catastrophic kidney failure. The hospital more or less told us that it wouldn’t be any use resuscitating him as he would only die eventually anyway, and asked us did we really want them to do that? We insisted that yes, we did want him treated that way. He had two episodes of cardiac arrest (clinical death, he insisted afterwards) and had we not been adamant, he would have not been revived.

They let him home to us, with the very evident attitude that he was only going home to die. Well, he didn’t; he had to go on weekly dialysis, but he had a further eight years of life, and good quality life too (he wasn’t bed-bound, he was active). The consultant nephrologist (who, by the way, was a decent man and a great doctor interested in and very involved in the treatment of his patients, not something I can say about all the consultants in that hospital) often referred to him as “my miracle man” (and we the family scoffed in the background that yeah, if it wasn’t for us, you lot would have let him die.

Eight years later, he had a stroke (related to a decades-long problem with blood clots from a faulty heart valve) and this time, we agreed no resuscitation because this time, he had grown feeble, you could see him fading physically and mentally, and we more or less knew he wouldn’t last out the year. So this time, he was ready to die and we were ready to let him go.

The first time, the hospital were not pushing euthanasia; they were (to the best of their judgement) thinking “Here’s an elderly man in very bad condition, it’s not likely he’ll survive, even if he does it won’t be for long and he’ll be in dreadful state; let him go”. Yet if we had acquiesced, my father would have missed eight years of life. His family (including grandsons) would have missed those eight years. That’s my worry.

Throwing in the Catholic view (I stand back and await the showers of rotten vegetables for even mentioning the unclean entity of the Church), regarding the example you use of potentially lethal doses of painkillers, this is the principle of double effect and is permissible and not considered euthanasia (i.e. the intention is to relieve pain and suffering, not to hasten death):

2278 Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of “over-zealous” treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted. The decisions should be made by the patient if he is competent and able or, if not, by those legally entitled to act for the patient, whose reasonable will and legitimate interests must always be respected.

2279 Even if death is thought imminent, the ordinary care owed to a sick person cannot be legitimately interrupted. The use of painkillers to alleviate the sufferings of the dying, even at the risk of shortening their days, can be morally in conformity with human dignity if death is not willed as either an end or a means, but only foreseen and tolerated as inevitable. Palliative care is a special form of disinterested charity. As such it should be encouraged

I’m glad I got a laugh out of HOL, but let me try that again: Yes, claims of Dutch murder buried under the name of euthanasia are wildly exaggerated, but two thirds of “grizzly euthanasia” are euphemisms for executions.

I didn’t say it was worth much, but you made separate complaints of (a) in Dutch and (b) not on internet. If anyone is looking for it in a university library, it might be easier to find as two issues of a journal* than as a book. But there’s really no point, since the same authors have written so much is that is accessible.

Claims from some quarters (*cough* Rick Santorum *cough*) that the Dutch elderly are living in constant fear of being murdered are hard to square with the fact that the Dutch elderly live a good deal longer than our own.

Surely this isn’t inconsistent with the idea that they could leave even longer, were there no legal euthanasia? I don’t disagree with your overall point, but this immediately struck me as faulty logic.

The thing that concerns me more is that “higher life expectancy” and “longer-lived elderly” are not at all the same; one country can have higher life expectancy than another by losing fewer people at younger ages. What matters here is something like “life expectancy at age 60”. Anyone got those figures for the Netherlands and the US?

Here’s a time series of Dutch life expectancy at age 65 and US life expectancy at all ages in 2009. The US is 17.5/20.2, which the Dutch exceed by maybe half a year.

Look at the Dutch time series: elderly life expectancy is rapidly rising, starting around the year 2000, as is true in the US; probably because of the Spanish flu. Thus it is important to compare use 2009 data for both countries.

Agreed. I guess my comment assumes an “and there’s no great reason for the Dutch to be a huge outlier in terms of life expectancy, which would be required for them to still beat their neighbors even with life expectancy being drastically reduced by excessive euthanasia.”

There might also people who avoid contact with the medical system when it would be most useful to them, because they anticipate it will undermine their freedom, e.g. depressed people who consider talking to a doctor about their suicidal ideation, and then think, “Wait, they can lock me up for that”, and then bury the idea. Or old or sick people who kill themselves at home alone with inferior methods instead of being institutionalized when it would otherwise become unavoidable.

The numbers of life-years lost this way should certainly be of interest for the pro-lifers.

I had a friend who, still active but anticipating decline, did kill himself after much research on methods. He concluded that he would have to do it before he became bedridden or otherwise unable to complete a somewhat demanding and illegal action.

Honestly, you’ve convinced me, this slippery slope seems quite well-guarded against if it were ever greased at all.

But I’m still pretty curious: how reliable are those numbers, considering that the doctor who euthanizes the patient is unlikely to say there were other/better options? And how much uncertainty is involved here, especially for things like “they would have lived less than an hour anyway”?

Impressive work, Scott. I think euthanasia is like the death penalty: A waste of attention and energy. Effort goes into fighting for or against the death penalty, instead of into fighting a justice system that regularly sentences people to long incarcerations with little evidence or for victimless crimes, or fighting crime or its causes. Effort goes into fighting for or against euthanasia that should go into fighting the legal and cultural strangleholds on doctors that prevent them from giving their patients effective treatments, and that prevent patients from having control over their own bodies, in every circumstance.

It is quite interesting that a paper about “fake data” operates with faked data itself.
The number of 1040 patients killed without consent, mentioned in the article of McTavish, can also be found in the doctoral dissertation of L.Pinjenborg, see Table 1 on p.30.
Even more importantly: The present paper, published 2013, cites the paper of Ritjens et al (2009), indicating that the number of euthanasia cases DEcreases in Netherlands. This is true: this number decreased slightly from 2001 to 2007. However, 2013 already data for the following 4 years were available. And these data demonstrate DOUBLE INCREASE of active euthanasia:https://www.euthanasiecommissie.nl/overdetoetsingscommissies/jaarverslag/
To sum up: Who works with falsified numbers, shoud not criticize others for their incorrect interpretation of correct numbers.

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Beeminder's an evidence-based willpower augmention tool that collects quantifiable data about your life, then helps you organize it into commitment mechanisms so you can keep resolutions. They've also got a blog about what they're doing here

James Koppel Coaching teaches software engineers how to spend less time debugging and write robust future-proof code. We’ve helped SSC readers be more confident in design decisions and articulate in code reviews. Advanced Software Design courses offered live and online.

80,000 Hours researches different problems and professions to help you figure out how to do as much good as possible. Their free career guide show you how to choose a career that's fulfilling and maximises your contribution to solving the world's most pressing problems.

Nectome is building the first brain preservation technique to verifiably preserve your memories for the future.

Metaculus is a platform for generating crowd-sourced predictions about the future, especially science and technology. If you're interested in testing yourself and contributing to their project, check out their questions page

Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm with a focus on technology and collaborative problem solving. We're always hiring talented programmers, traders, and researchers and have internships and fulltime positions in New York, London, and Hong Kong. No background in finance required.

AISafety.com hosts a Skype reading group Wednesdays at 19:45 UTC, reading new and old articles on different aspects of AI Safety. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere.

Giving What We Can is a charitable movement promoting giving some of your money to the developing world or other worthy causes. If you're interested in this, consider taking their Pledge as a formal and public declaration of intent.

Dr. Laura Baur is a psychiatrist with interests in literature review, reproductive psychiatry, and relational psychotherapy; see her website for more. Note that due to conflict of interest she doesn't treat people in the NYC rationalist social scene.

MealSquares is a "nutritionally complete" food that contains a balanced diet worth of nutrients in a few tasty easily measurable units. Think Soylent, except zero preparation, made with natural ingredients, and looks/tastes a lot like an ordinary scone.

Triplebyte is building an objective and empirically validated software engineering recruitment process. We don’t look at resumes, just at whether you can code. We’ve had great success helping SSC readers get jobs in the past. We invite you to test your skills and try our process!

Altruisto is a browser extension so that when you shop online, a portion of the money you pay goes to effective charities (no extra cost to you). Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid.

Collin F. of Instacart is looking for software engineers to work there.